I believe that the ability of people to have convivial and productive online interaction is limited by a lack of the cues about those with whom we're interacting. This line of research explores the idea that providing very simple cues can support online conversations that approach the grace and coherence that is natural in face to face interaction.

This work involved designing and studying the use of simple shared visualizations called social proxies that provide participants with a sense of who and how many are present, whether and how they are interacting, and so forth. I've designed visualizations for synchronous and asynchonrous online settings such as chat rooms, online meetings, text-based fora, auctions, queues and other forms of group interaction. You can get a short overview here, or an in depth treatment here.

The majority of the world's population now lives in cities, and this shift shows no signs of slowing. Both the pressures of continued immigration and the cumulative effects of unsustainable water, energy, and waste management policies create a vital need to address urban problems.

My work at IBM centered on "Smarter Cities." But whereas IBM's approach has to do with using sensors to gather information that allows urban systems to be analyzed and optimized, I'm interested in how to tap the local knowledge and expertise of urban inhabitants, and how to design systems that aid societies in shifting their collective behaviors – what I call "crowdshifting."

For a taste of this work, you can read a short essay on smart parking meters, or an academic paper on a city-scale project on using smart meters to give residents feedback on their resource use.

My earliest work in HCI – carried out mostly at Apple – was focused on personal information management. I'm interested in how people create personal systems – piles, files, annotations, etc. – to support their own knowledge work, and how technology might support those personal systems.

I've recently had the humbling experience of re-reading some of my early papers. One from 1991 predicted that one day it would be possible for ordinary people to access as many as 10,000 databases via the internet, and was quite concerned with the difficulty of query languages. On the other hand, I think my 1996 paper on "social hypertext" was pretty much on the mark regarding the social nature of onine activity, although unfortunately I overlooked the rise of online advertising which drastically altered the social ecology of the web. A recap of this line of work can be found in my slideshare presentation on Personal Information Ecologies.

My chief interest is what is going on in the 'real world,' but to come to grips with that a variety of conceptual tools are needed. Among my longest running interests in this area is the concept of pattern languages – see my Lingua Francas paper. For over a decade I maintained a directory of work on patterns in HCI, although it is no longer current. I also have had a long term interest in the use of stories as a design tool – see this essay on storytelling – as well as scenarios and prototyping.

Although my work on Social Translucence has begun attracting attention a decade after its publication, I am ambivalent about the role of theory. I believe our field is too young for a grand overarching theory, but that more limited meso- frameworks and theories can be helpful as ways of enabling the discipline to take coherent approaches to particular problems and disciplines. I make this case in my essay Five Lenses for Interaction Design, and a bit more humorously in my poem, Theory Theory.

This is a book of essays I edited with David McDonald in 2005 - 06. Each author was asked to reflect on a book or paper -- at least a decade old -- that had influenced their work in HCI. Works that authors choose ranged from well-known classics to obscure papers that had received little notice when published, to works that at first glance seemed very distant from the field. The book was a delight to edit, and it still reads well, today, IMHO.

The official blurb: Over almost three decades, the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) has produced a rich and varied literature. Although the focus of attention today is naturally on new work, older contributions that played a role in shaping the trajectory and character of the field have much to tell us. The contributors to HCI Remixed were asked to reflect on a single work at least ten years old that influenced their approach to HCI. The result is this collection of fifty-one short, engaging, and idiosyncratic essays, reflections on a range of works in a variety of forms that chart the emergence of a new field.

For more informationsee Amazon or MIT Press